Nexus 5 Sells Out in Hours… Specs and Pricing Inside

There have been numerous leaks about the Nexus 5 and we’ve been waiting for this day for many months and it has finally come upon us. Without very little to no warning, Google launched their newest Nexus phone with little fanfare from the company. While you might see an Apple, Motorola (now part of Google) or Samsung do a launch event for a phone, Google appears to know their audience for this phone quite well and they know they don’t need to say much. They just need to deliver a solid phone.

The truth is, on paper, the Nexus 5 lives up to geek’s expectations for this phone. It has a 5" 1080P display, a 2.3 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 SoC, 2GB of LPDDR3 800 MHz, 9-band Global LTE, Wireless Charging, a sizable 2300 mAh battery and all for the low price of $349 for the 16GB version. Much like the Nexus 4 was the cost-down brother of the Optimus G, as is the Nexus 5 the cost-down brother of the LG G2. However, it appears that the gap between the two devices is much narrower than before. Especially when you consider that some leaked benchmarks are pointing to the fact that the Nexus 5 might actually be faster than the LG G2. Keep in mind, this thing also has 802.11ac Wi-Fi and a ton of other features that the G2 also has, and probably even some that it doesn’t. The only place where the G2 is a clear winner is in the overall size of the device and the 3000 mAh batter, which should give the G2 a longer battery life.

Google’s pricing strategy to sell an affordable quality smartphone puts the price of a 16 GB version at $349 which is incredibly accessible to most people, that is unless they’re on Verizon. Since this phone won’t work on Verizon. We don’t know all of the details, but it seems like Google’s and Verizon’s relationship is still rocky after the issues they had with the previous Nexus devices. Either way, this phone is basically delivering the specs of a $700 at exactly half the price. If you want the 32 GB version of the Nexus 5, you simply pay an additional $50 and that’s about it.

Google is offering the Nexus 5 in two colors, White and Black, and in the two capacities that we stated earlier. Currently, the 16 GB variant is completely sold out and cannot even be backordered. Google has turned off the ability to purchase these until they get more stock. Now, the 32 GB variants are still available for purchase with a month backorder. However, I was informed that my Nexus 5 would ship by November 5th and instead it shipped same day, so it doesn’t seem outrageous that many people will likely get their Nexus 5’s sooner than anticipated. Considering that Google is completely out of 16 GB Nexus 5’s I’m curious as to how many phones they’ve actually sold in this short period of time.

While I think it would have been nice for Google to have informed their faithful buyers when they would be putting up the Nexus 5 for sale, they did handle it much better than in the past. The Nexus 4 launch was a buggy one that made people feel like they had to wait until Google released the next ‘batch’ of production. This time around, people simply ordered and knew what date to expect and as Google went through their inventory they kept refreshing the page with new delivery dates. The fact that Google is sold out of their entire inventory for the next month is a perfect illustration of giving consumers what they want. The Moto X is a perfect example of doing the opposite, and it’s really shocking to think that both are coming from essentially the same company. Sure Motorola isn’t entirely assimilated into the Google Borg, but it seems ridiculous to think that a phone so poorly spec’ed as the Moto X can be almost twice as expensive as something as brilliant as the Nexus 5.

Hopefully we’ll have a review of the Nexus 5 for you soon as ours has already shipped and we’re eagerly awaiting its arrival.